Deputy Sheriff Everett Smith pushed open the door of his brother's trailer home in a heavily wooded area on the outskirts of Fryeburg, Maine, last Friday. Bryan Smith, a 43-year-old former construction worker, appeared to be asleep in bed. He was dead. There was no sign of trauma or indication that he had died in pain. The empty bottles of painkillers found nearby were the only indication of probable cause.

'There he was, on his back in bed, covered up,' said Sheriff James Miclon. 'He was just laying there, like he went to sleep.' A preliminary postmortem examination was inconclusive, and toxicology reports are not expected to be complete for months.

Smith's death did not just end his own ill-fated life: it closed a remarkable saga involving a loner and one of the world's bestselling authors that has gripped the public.

In June last year, it was Smith's blue Dodge caravan that crashed into Stephen King, who was out for a walk, with such force that the author's head smashed the windscreen. As King himself wrote in The Observer last week, the writer was lucky to survive.

Smith was a forlorn figure. Since another accident in 1979 he had lived engulfed by difficulties that seemed to be getting worse: he lived alone, drew disability payments and took occasional jobs as a wood-cutter and mechanic when the pain of his injuries was not too bad. Yet in the year after the collision, friends said Smith was tormented as much by remorse as pain.

Losing his driving licence after the crash with King only made his problems worse, forcing him either to hitch lifts or to walk several miles to town using crutches, and he had recently learnt he might have to start using a wheelchair.

He lived alone except for two Rottweilers, Pistol and Bullet. His driving record was appalling - 11 convictions since 1989 for speeding and driving under the influence - in an area where driving is hardly an art.

But it was not until he topped the crest of an incline in his Dodge while simultaneously trying to prevent one of his dogs rummaging in a beer cooler that Smith's life took on a wider public profile.

The van swerved off the road just as King, taking his regular four-mile walk, was returning from relieving himself in the woods . The impact threw the writer up and over the van, propelling him into a ditch 14 feet away. 'I was surprised he was even alive,' recalled a local man, Donald Baker, who witnessed the crash from his pick-up truck. 'He was in a tangled-up mess, lying crooked, and had a heck of gash in his head. He kept asking what had happened.'

As they waited for help to arrive, Smith appeared nonchalant. He thought he'd hit a deer until he noticed King's bloody glasses on his front seat.

'His look, as he sits with his cane drawn across his lap, is one of pleasant commiseration,' King recalled. 'It says "Ain't the two of us just had the shittiest luck".'

Bad luck indeed. The collision of metal and flesh, as well as the briefly conjoining fates of King and Smith, seemed fit for one of the author's books. But it wasn't: King is recovering from a shattered hip and pelvis, broken ribs, punctured lung and fractured thigh bone. And Smith, a drifter without much luck, is dead.

'This is a guy who only has a little bit of brains to begin with. I mean I have fantasies of confronting him,' King wrote in the extract. 'But Bryan Smith is like Gertrude Stein said about LA "There's no there, there".'

'Call it fate, call it God ... But what you're left with is this guy, who has the IQ of a tomato soup can. An empty tomato soup can. And he hits me at the one blind spot on a long road, no one else to hit for miles, when, say Nasa can't get a missile to land on Mars with all the brains and technology in the world, then you think there's something odd going on. Or maybe Nasa should just hire Bryan Smith.'

Smith's death was widely reported in the US press and his life was largely reduced to that of a bit player in the life of the author. Reports played heavily on the connections between King's work and his chance encounter with Smith, using word play such as 'final chapter,' 'last few pages' and 'surprise ending'. Susan Stone, in a letter of complaint to the Bangor Daily News , the paper that first reported Smith's demise, wrote that she was disturbed by the 'callous manner' in which the paper reported his death and found it to be 'in extremely poor taste'.

But the intersection of fame and anonymity where King and Smith met did neither of them a favour. Before his death, Smith often said he felt singled out for harsher treatment because of King's celebrity. 'Just because it's Stephen King,' he said, 'he can make up his own laws, his own rules. I'm being used as a guinea pig. I know I hit him. I didn't mean to. Somebody can't accept that. Why can't they accept that it was an accident?'

There was often a note of self-pity in his comments to the press. 'They don't look at my handicap,' he said after the accident that elevated his name to that of an answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. 'They don't care if I breathe tomorrow or die the next day.'

King, who has undergone gruelling therapy after three weeks in hospital, was incensed when Smith described the crash as an 'accident without a cause' and chided prosecutors for making a deal with Smith that did not include any jail time and did not permanently revoke his licence.

The incident caused friction within the small-town community that both called home. Many Bangor residents believed that once King learnt of Smith's driving record the author used his influence against him.

Smith's lawyers argued that their client could hardly get a fair trial in a town where the ambulance service, the ball park and the public library have all been considerably endowed by the author.

'What he took from me, my time, my peace of mind and my ease of body, are simply gone and no court can bring them back,' King said in a statement read in court after Smith pleaded guilty to reckless driving to avoid a more serious charge of aggravated assault. King called Smith's plea bargain - resulting in the driving ban and a six-month suspended jail sentence - 'irresponsible public business'.

But Smith later offered apologies to King and accepted responsibility for the accident. 'What a tragedy King went through,' he said recently. 'We're all sorry for what happened, and we hope King understands that.'

Smith eventually came to grips with the incident and seemed untroubled by the people who snapped pictures of his trailer or flashed their middle fingers at him, said Ron Ela, a local sheet-metal worker who occasionally gave Smith lifts. 'We kind of joked a little bit, and laughed about it,' he said.

Over the past few months, Smith's life appeared to be on the verge of turning around. Despite his worsening health problems, Lisa Coury, who dated Smith for two years until a few weeks before his death, said he still insisted on helping her with car repairs, plumbing or other household chores.

'He shouldn't have been doing it, but he was just really kindhearted and wanted to help,' she said. 'It would take him a long time and he would be in even more excruciating pain after.'

Another friend, Judy Townsend, said she found him rude and coarse when she met him two years ago but eventually found him to be kind, thoughtful and considerate. Both women spoke of Smith's sharp sense of humour, and said he often spoke of ways that he might put his mind to use. He had said he wanted to buy a computer so he might design instructions for building furniture, and even contemplated writing a book about his life and the accident.

But it was not to be. After Smith was found dead, King expressed regret. 'I was very sorry to hear of the passing of Bryan Smith,' he said. 'The death of a 43-year-old man can only be termed untimely. I would wish better for anyone. Our lives came together in a strange way. I'm grateful I didn't die. I'm sorry he's gone.'